Link column with a static text using django-tables2

Question

I cannot find a replacement for the LinkColumn in the new versions of django-tables2. Author states that LinkColumn is deprecated and shouldn't be used. But the new linkify solution is poorly documented and doesn't have all the features of the old version. For example, I have this column:

    edit = tables.LinkColumn(
        'wagtailadmin_pages:edit', args=[A('page.pk')],
        text='Edit'
    )

It displays a link to the wagtail admin edit page called Edit. There's simply no way to achieve the same using linkify because linkify only works if you have valid accessor on the column. But accessor cannot return same static text for all rows (unless I modify the model to add a dummy property - but this particular model is in the 3rd party package and it would feel like a duct tape solution anyway).

In all other cases, column will not display a link. I've studied the source code and it seems that such case is simply not supported by the django-tables2 > 2.0.0.

Is there any clean and understandable way to construct a link column with a static link text using linkify?

You could override get_absolute_url on the model and just pass linkify=True, perhaps, but that depends on the model. Alternatively, you could define a vanilla edit = tables.Column(...) and create a render_edit in your tables.Table subclass — Mark R.
I cannot override get_absolute_url or any other property of the model because it's from django-wagtail package. Thanks for suggesting overriding render_edit method - I was so focused on trying to make the pesky linkify work that I totally forgot about trying other approaches. — Eugene Morozov

Eugene Morozov Eugene Morozov · Accepted Answer · 2019-03-12T09:41:39

Answering my own question. It seems that it is impossible to fully replace LinkColumn with the linkify feature. The following code solves my problem:

from django.urls import reverse
from django.utils.text import mark_safe

import django_tables2 as tables

from wagtail.core.models import PageRevision


class WagtailRevisionsTable(tables.Table):
    title = tables.Column(
        accessor='page.title',
        linkify=lambda record: record.page.url,
        verbose_name='Title'
    )
    edit = tables.Column(
        accessor='page.pk'
    )

    class Meta:
        model = PageRevision
        fields = ('title', 'created_at', 'user', 'edit')
        template_name = 'django_tables2/bootstrap-responsive.html'

    def render_edit(self, value):
        url = reverse('wagtailadmin_pages:edit', args=[value])
        return mark_safe(f'<a href="{url}">Edit</a>')

The code with the old LinkColumn was much more concise, I don't understand the reason for change and documentations really doesn't help. There's simply not enough information on linkify or render_col methods.

So I hope this answer will help some poor soul trying to port old code to the django-tables2 >= 2.0.

Link column with a static text using django-tables2

1 Answers